Louise Bourgeois


Simona Vendrame: The experience of pain is a fundamental element in your work. Your Cells—works that you started to produce at the beginning of the ’90s—are emblematic of the concepts of suffering and loneliness, but not only: the “cell” is also a place where one cannot hide, where one has no personal privacy and is exposed to the searching gaze of those on the outside looking in.

Louise Bourgeois: The word “pain” is much too vague. You have physical pain, you have mental and intellectual pain, and you have emotional and psychological pain. Referring to the biological meaning of the word “cell,” the sculptures shown at the Carnegie International in 1991 were structures where I needed to isolate each type of pain and confine it to a world of its own. Only then could I analyze them, only then could I see how one type of pain could easily merge into another, and only then could I see the relationship between pain and fear and how they are experienced through the five senses of my body. There is the relationship between fear and memory—how do the fears of the past operate on me today?—hence their relationship to the Cells and the reference to prison. Pain and fear isolate us, they keep us from communicating, they keep us from growing, and they keep us cut off from the world. The goal is to live in the present and go forth unafraid. To deal with pain, or to deal with any problem, you have to be specific. Each sculpture of mine is a response to a specific emotion or problem. For example, you experience anxiety. Anxiety is too vague. It’s too free-floating to define. You can only deal with anxiety by focusing on one fear at a time…


The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 85, May-June 2001.




Simona Vendrame